Welcome to Apache HBase!

HBase is the Hadoop database. Think of it as a distributed scalable Big Data store.

When Would I Use HBase?

Use HBase when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google's Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop and HDFS.

Features

HBase provides:

  • Linear and modular scalability.
  • Strictly consistent reads and writes.
  • Automatic and configurable sharding of tables
  • Automatic failover support between RegionServers.
  • Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables.
  • Easy to use Java API for client access.
  • Block cache and Bloom Filters for real-time queries.
  • Query predicate push down via server side Filters
  • Thrift gateway and a REST-ful Web service that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options
  • Extensible jruby-based (JIRB) shell
  • Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX

Where Can I Get More Information?

See the Architecture Overview, the Apache HBase Reference Guide FAQ, and the other documentation links on the left!

News

May 22nd, 2012 HBaseCon2012 in San Francisco

January 23rd, 2012 HBase 0.92.0 released. Download it!

January 19th, 2012 Meetup @ EBay

December 23rd, 2011 HBase 0.90.5 released. Download it!

November 29th, 2011 Developer Pow-Wow in SF at Salesforce HQ

November 7th, 2011 HBase Meetup in NYC (6PM) at the AppNexus office

August 22nd, 2011 HBase Hackathon (11AM) and Meetup (6PM) at FB in PA

June 30th, 2011 HBase Contributor Day, the day after the Hadoop Summit hosted by Y!

June 8th, 2011 HBase Hackathon in Berlin to coincide with Berlin Buzzwords

May 19th, 2011 HBase 0.90.3 released. Download it!

April 12th, 2011 HBase 0.90.2 released. Download it!

Old News